The role of public space in molding city politics has been extensively theorized and studied. The shaping of citizenship and the establishment of citizen rights have been connected to struggles over and in public space, as well as to discourses that problematize public space as a constituent element of public life. It would be accurate to say that public space has formed the terrain for crises of citizenship more often than it has provided the stable background upon which historically specific forms of citizenship are expressed and enacted.

Public spaces have always been sites of social contention. According to Marcel Hénaff and Tracy Strong, “public space is always a contestation over the legitimacy of what can be brought and what can be excluded from the life one chooses and is required to have in common with others.”1 This perspective figures public space as a dynamic arrangement of public acts and disputes over what should be considered “common.” The very meaning of “common” finds its expression in the constitutive practices of inhabiting, sustaining, or transforming public space; however, common worlds are by no means taken for granted by all. Indeed, public spaces often purported to be common worlds—explicitly represented in and signified by glorious public buildings, squares, or monuments—are challenged through acts of [End Page 77] contestation and social struggle as well as by practices that create other kinds of emergent common worlds in, against, and beyond existing public spaces.

Urban common worlds are always under construction and thus open to various forms of contestation. Modern and contemporary cities appear to be concrete social worlds that shape and express shared universes of meaning and action. No matter how complex and multileveled the spatiotemporal order of such cities might be, such an order aspires to establish a common world that contains recognizable social relations and patterns of social practice. Today’s enclave cities seem to be an agglomeration of self-contained urban worlds that would otherwise distinguish among discrete citizen profiles and urban behaviors. Many people have to inhabit neighborhood enclaves (gated communities or slums), many have to do their shopping in shopping enclaves (malls and large department stores); a more extreme example are corporate buildings that are often fortress-like controlled areas, and public spaces under severe surveillance often end up being restricted areas for those who do not conform to specific behavior patterns. One thinks of sports enclaves (including Olympic facilities) that tend to evolve into exemplary spaces of so-called “crowd management.” Ceremonial public spaces, however, are meant to indicate that an overarching common world can be identified with a specific society and condensed within its state institutions. This world is supposed to be emphatically connected with promises of social cohesion and peace. In urban public space, contemporary forms of domination thus appear as legitimate, productive, and suitable for the reproduction of the corresponding social order.

By this logic, public space becomes a site of contestation over the very possibility of the common. Jacques Rancière writes, for example, that politics “conceives community … as a polemic over the common.”2 In other words, any social contestation that targets the meaning and reproduction of what is considered to be common within a specific society is, essentially, a political act. What reproduces existing arrangements of roles and practices does not deserve to be included as politics, according to Rancière. It is merely the expression of a society that perpetuates itself—a social arrangement that Rancière designates as a “police” order.3 It is questionable, however, to suggest that it might be possible for a society to remain totally stable and beyond internal antagonisms—and thus outside the challenges of politics. Politics is present as long as there are disputes over the meaning, the value, and the form of the common— [End Page 78] no matter how latent, implicit, or even distorted and disguised as obedience those disputes may be.

In point of fact, it seems that we live in a period in which politics, in the form of a polemic over the common, directly upsets the order of contemporary urban common worlds. And this is happening not only in the area of discourse or ideology but in the arena of practice as well. Different segments of the urban populations seem increasingly to distrust the very central shaping force of constructed common worlds: the state mechanisms along with the forms of social life imposed by state-regulated social relations. Displaced, marginalized, or disempowered populations in world metropolises reclaim their right to the city through struggles that emphatically redefine the area of the common.4 In struggles to obtain or update urban transportation, in fights against the privatization of important urban resources and services, and in campaigns in support of decent housing and health and education facilities, people explicitly challenge the neoliberal architectonics of dominant common worlds. What James Holston has termed “insurgent citizenship” refers to this set of acts and demands, which targets inequalities that are evident in the everydayness of exclusion and discrimination. Insurgent citizenship challenges dominant ideologies that connect public space with forms of regulation that result in corroborating social inequalities. Moreover, Holston suggests that insurgent citizenship is connected to a “politicization of the oikos.”5 This means that the very limits that shape the domestic realm (oikos) are being questioned as people from the periferias of the metropolis construct their own community spaces.

True, common space (as distinct from public space) existed and still exists in peri-urban and especially rural communities as a form of community-managed, shared space. It is beyond doubt that shared memories of displaced rural populations have contributed to the rediscovery of common space by peoples in their struggles to live in large and hostile cities.6 However, common space in urban contexts emerges today either in the form of public space appropriated by those who are excluded from it or in the form of collectively managed spaces meant to [End Page 79] support a common urban life that creates new (and not simply traditional) social relations and bonds.7 For example, the precariat, marginalized, and peripheral populations house themselves in collectively reclaimed urban areas, often through practices of mutual help connected to shared worldviews that consider community as the center of human existence. One might cite, for instance, mutirao in Brazil, or minga in Andean countries, or ubuntu in South Africa. Latin American marginalized urban populations have in fact inventively rediscovered the uses and values of public space by reconstructing collective ways of producing and maintaining it. Landless worker movements and Homeless movements not only struggle for life in urban and rural spaces but also often construct new relations between public and domestic space by focusing insistently on the importance of shared community spaces. A new kind of space seems to emerge in those urban collective experiences: common space.

What seems important here is that common space is not simply the space that corresponds to a distinct community and is used by those who belong to it. Although this is often the case—as, for instance, disempowered communities trying to defend a minimum common life by barricading themselves in shared enclaves—nevertheless, common spaces sometimes transcend the limits of the specific community that generated them. Common spaces remain open to newcomers especially when the collective effort that produced them has not resulted in a stable community of users. This happened in recent urban struggles that were performed in and through public space occupations and that managed to create their own ephemeral but innovative and liberating forms of publicness. In the tent cities of the “Arab Spring” manifestations, in the “Occupy” and the Indignados-type square occupations (in London, Athens, Madrid and other cities), in the Gezi Park (Istanbul) and Hong Kong self-managed temporary settlements of protest, as in so many other cases of urban mobilizations, people have created common spaces that were shaped through ongoing negotiations between diverse collective actors sharing a respect for differences and a longing for equality.8

Distrust for the state, explicit clashes with unjust rules and forms of urban governance, and overt confrontations with exclusionary power arrangements may thus characterize the emergence of common space in today’s metropolises. What is new, however, in the multiform and dispersed, but often networked and inventive, production of common spaces is “an always alert and always generous [End Page 80] disposition towards the common.”9 Common space is a project and an exigency that emerges in contemporary urban conflicts as well as in dispersed collective survival initiatives. The contemporary metropolis is transversed by networks of cooperation and communication that produce not only tangible goods but also forms of sharing, knowledges, affects, habits, and forms of collective action.10 Common-space experiences emerge in different practices of everyday collaboration that either escape capitalist control and command or unfold in a tense relation with market and state mechanisms. Common space is, thus, both a potential means of developing commoning practices and the stakes or scope of such practices. This is why it seems crucial for any attempt to go beyond contemporary forms of domination to be able to learn from the diverse practices that make common space happen, to experiment with common space production, to explore common space spatialities as spatialities distinct from dominant “enclavism,”11 and to reclaim existing public spaces as common spaces. Is it possible to direct architectural research and action towards such knowledge and experience?

ARCHITECTURE AND COMMON PUBLIC FORM

Architecture can be considered an intellectual practice that focuses on the shaping of space. Throughout its history as a profession or as a set of socially recognizable practices, architecture has produced ideas, projects, and buildings that were meant to provide space to be inhabited by different societies with differing values, priorities, and forms of production and reproduction. It seems, however, that architecture has not only been responsible for covering the demands of various authorities and satisfying the needs of the ruling classes but also of devising forms that would shape those needs and demands as well as those that might describe future or utopian societies. This is because, at least since the Renaissance, architecture has been an intellectual and not a simply a professional practice: it has been actively engaged in debates about social values and social meanings, taking part in what Pierre Bourdieu had described as “struggle[s] over representations.”12 Thus architecture has been part of politics in Rancière’s sense of the word: it has contributed to various polemics over the common.

However, it is important to keep in mind that architecture is not merely a distinct form of discourse, although debates about space are often conducted in the arenas of architectural theory and architectural presentations. Architecture [End Page 81] engages the polemics over the common as a practice of shaping space, as a practice that problematizes and explores spatial form. And here we must at least sketch the potentialities inherent in this practice that may indeed support struggles over the definition of the common, and especially the definition and uses of common space. Form in fact is the end product as well as the initial focus of architectural practice on at least three levels, each of which seems to influence the other.

1. Form as organization: Form can be considered as the overall arrangement of a specific set of spaces. From this perspective, a spatial construction or arrangement is the result of a specific set of organized, formalized spatial relations.

2. Form as expression: Form can be considered as the structuring of meaningful comparisons between spatial elements that are being articulated to express a coherent and recognizable statement of social meaning (such as a collective identity, a valuable lesson from the past, or the legitimization of an institution).

3. Form as materialization: Form can be considered as the result of certain acts that employ materials and technologies as well as social relations of collaboration in order to produce concrete arrangements of space (e.g., by concretizing those arrangements through specific material boundaries).

During the first “heroic” years of the Modern Architecture movement, for example, the complex problem of housing—considered as a social good to be made available to all the members of industrial societies—was stated not simply as a new social need but, essentially, as a problem of form, as a problem of architecture. And it was confronted as a problem of organization (discussions on standards, on Existenzminimum, on types of mass dwelling, etc.), as a problem of expression (mass production expressing efficiency and equality, forms borrowed from machine aesthetics etc.), and as problem of materialization (cooperation between various arts à la Bauhaus, modernist appeals for the industrialization of building construction understood as a set of technology and work relations, etc.). In other words, by exploring spatial form in each of these three levels, one can see that architecture may, at times, either effectively reproduce dominant social values (and historically specific social needs) or gesture towards possible urban worlds. [End Page 82]

THE ARCHITECTURAL COMMONS: FORM AS ORGANIZATION

Common space, as we have seen, emerges today through practices linked to the everyday survival of the poor and the excluded, as well as through practices of overt contestation that challenge existing oligarchies and forms of political domination. In both cases (as well as in cases in which both sets of practices converge), common space cannot be described as a stable set of spatial relations but rather as a set of spatial relations that are being performed through practices of “urban commoning”—as in the politicized homeless movements that seek to build new social relations in their occupied buildings. If it is to remain different from public and private space, common space must be a process. This means that communities and collectivities need to plan those spaces but also to make them happen: to create them by shaping uses and rules of use in the process of inhabiting them.

A crucial lesson to be learned from the practices of creating common space is that understood in terms of form-as-organization, this space is not characterized by an arrangement of parts that constitute a clearly demarcated area. Rather, this space has an inherently relational character. Common space is more like a threshold area, or rather a network of threshold areas that mediates between spaces of diverse levels of privacy. What may look like a miniature square may, for instance, be the common courtyard of a self-managed MTST settlement in Brazil—something more like a space with porous and movable boundaries that are being shaped and transformed by those who collectively use it.13 Likewise, in the occupied Syntagma square in Athens during the period of the worldwide Occupy movement actions, space was constructed so that it no longer was [End Page 83] bounded by arrangements meant to regulate the uses and meaning of a ceremonial no-man’s land: Syntagma square was converted to an expanding network of threshold spaces hosting diverse micro-communities of commoning.14

Can architecture study the characteristics of such spaces and propose forms of spatial arrangement that may contribute to their proliferation, making them at [End Page 84] the same time more adjustable to the needs of urban commoners? We already have examples of such attempts. In the case of Cabo de la Cebada in Madrid, for example, an empty sunken plot adjacent to an indoor market in La Latina neighborhood has been converted by active citizens to a very lively common space. After the demolition of a large municipal swimming pool in 2009, and because the economic crisis cancelled the municipality’s development-through-privatization plans, a peculiar hollowed-out urban space has been transformed through citizen participation to a neighborhood common-space area, bounded by high walls. Intervention in that existing open space on a level that was lower than that of the surrounding streets produced innovative forms of theater-like spatial organization.

Porosity and multi-use urban furniture became the means to create spatial relations encouraging the participation of people in shifting boundaries between different segments of the area. Most of the urban furniture was designed in [End Page 85] experimental workshops focused on innovative recycling. Creators of smaller common spaces for groups of citizens focused on different initiatives and converted large parts of the available space to event stages without ceremonial overtones.

Another example is the Navarinou occupied park in Athens.15 In a collective neighborhood initiative that occupied a parking lot and converted it to a self-managed urban micro-park, participating architects worked together with all those residents involved in the initiative in order to collectively plan the area as a porous meeting place. This is multifarious common space that was produced by people determined to actively create an open space for public use at Exarchia (a neighborhood which was connected to many active movements and which had been one of the most important centers of December 2008 youth uprisings). [End Page 86] It still evolves through innovative re-arrangements: new spatial elements are being devised that act as social micro-condensers. For instance, a recently installed multi-use unit made out of a reshaped container box was designed by students of National Technical University’s of Athens School of Architecture.

THE ARCHITECTURAL COMMONS: FORM AS EXPRESSION

In terms of form-as-expression, architecture can also contribute to the creation of common spaces. As an intellectual practice that may enter into battles over representations, architecture can experiment with possible forms of space that may represent types of communal life yet to be explored. True, architectural form cannot by itself ensure the potential communal, anti-authoritarian, and equalitarian uses of public space. Foucault was right in observing that there are no actual spaces of freedom but only practices of freedom: “I think that it can never be inherent in the structure of things to guarantee the exercise of freedom. The guarantee of freedom is freedom.”16 And it is when “the liberating intentions of the architect coincide with the real practice of people in the exercise of their freedom” that architecture can produce positive effects in this direction.17 Architecture may catalyze collective practices oriented towards collective self-management (which seems to be the only socially meaningful performance of freedom) and even represent or prefigure emancipating social relations in arrangements of space meant to support them.

During the period between the two World Wars, architectural proposals to build new and more just social spaces (and hence a new and more just society) have grown on the fertile ground of important social experiments in Europe. “Red Vienna,” the Weimar Republic’s Grossiedlungen, and Soviet Russia’s early urban experiments in the collectivization of city life constitute an amazing heritage of utopian as well as innovatively realist projects in which the meaning and the values attributed to public space were extensively rethought.18 This was not the time yet, especially in the western world, for experimentations with common space, although the aim of designing a “new city” for the “new man” was connected to devising new communal spaces. Common laundry areas as well as kindergarten buildings in most of the new neighborhoods in Vienna, Frankfurt and Berlin were more like extensions of the welfare state than like genuine common spaces in which communities expressed their distinct values of cohabitation and themselves shaped the rules of commoning. [End Page 87]

Architectural efforts to rethink spatial form as a means to express commoning values can, however, learn a lot from those important Modernist socio-urban interventions between the wars. Specific questions arise from studying these early movements. Is it necessary, for example, to devise explicit architectural symbols that condense (in order to express) the values of common space? In Red Vienna, architects employed colossal statues to indicate the values of an emerging sought-for proletarian community destined to create a liberating future. Today’s common-space architectural prefigurations may employ more modest means: a multiplicity of architectural symbols evoking different cultures and encouraging cross-fertilizations; recognizable everyday forms of common life recuperated from their extensive appropriation by consumerism; emblemizings of environmentally aware cultures and markers of energy-saving and recycling ethics, and so on.

In contrast to most Modernist holistic and programmatic architectural gestures that tried to devise utopian forms to express a preconceived future, today’s architecture may need to express commoning as a set of practices oriented towards difference rather than sameness. The legendary Byker Wall, regarded as one of the UK’s best postwar council estates, is an example of such an effort to express shared community values through architectural form by differentiating, at the same time, the facades and layout of different apartment types. Although this was the result of a participatory design process, and the leading architect, Ralph Erskine, was explicitly inspired by Swedish social-democratic welfare ideas, Byker Wall did not escape the fate of social housing complexes that eventually became areas of solitude and alienation.19 On the other hand, and in contrast, New Urbanism’s proposals are connected to a re-invention of the diverse urban housing typologies in traditional US cities, in the context of planning new neighborhoods or cities (as, for example, Celebration City in Florida). They thus have only superficially contributed to expressing values connected to designed shared spaces. Architectural form, in this latter case, becomes the means to create scenery for simulated space-commoning. Common space needs to [End Page 88] reflect the power of active comparisons with previous and existing projects and embrace everyday negotiations between communities of difference if it is to sustain encounters that aim at producing inclusive common worlds.

ARCHITECTURAL COMMONS: FORM AS MATERIALIZATION

Shaping possible common spaces through processes of materialization in suggested or discovered spatial forms is also an important aspect of architecture’s contribution to space commoning. Materialization does not refer only to the actual processes of construction; it also necessarily includes forms of work organization and relevant acts of knowledge sharing. Participative planning and “cooperative design” are practices that generate proposals through the active participation of potential users in the planning of the proposed design. The long history of such architectural and urban planning experiments, which dates back to the “advocacy planning” practices of the 1970s, includes cases in which the future users of urban space were also directly involved in proposal development and implementation.

Very instructive in this sense is the example of the USINA team from São Paulo, Brazil, a group of architects, planners, economists and other relevant housing experts that explicitly supports participatory planning and works mainly with homeless movements. One USINA report effectively sums up the logic of this team’s interventions: “In the case of urban mutiroes, the pedagogical process of social change begins with the people’s organization in the struggle for land and access to public funding; it continues with the collective definition of projects and is finally consolidated in stonemasonry.”20 Organized in the context of very active movements struggling for the right to housing, Homeless Workers associations not only participated in the design of their future social housing complexes but were educated by USINA to be able to work in the construction process efficiently and through organized forms of collaboration. These were directly connected to the rich tradition of community cooperation developed in Brazil’s rural areas (the mutirao tradition): they were evaluated not only in terms of efficiency but also as instances of how community feeling could be built and shared. Materialization thus acquired an educative role for the members of an emerging community of inhabitants. They were learning skills as well as discovering how to work and live together: how to create their own common urban environment and how to support each other.21 [End Page 89]

All of this is not outside the realm of architecture, understood as a complex mixture of knowledges, skills, patterns of collaboration between experts, and forms to communication between experts and users. For example, the USINA team proposed building construction based on a system utilizing prefabricated, load-bearing structural elements, in order to make it possible for future residents to work as unskilled or low-skilled workers in most of the on-site works. Construction work thus was an important part of the participation process. The project illustrated how architecture may indeed contribute to the production of shared common spaces by envisaging construction processes as commoning processes. The resulting common spaces of the USINA projects (common staircases or courtyards open to the dwellers’ micro-communities) were not only recognized as such through use but were also symbolically identified with the collectivities of the participating urban commoners.

ARCHITECTURE AND THE EXIGENCY OF THE COMMONS

There are two crucial questions that transverse the three levels of architectural form discussed above. First, who is shaping the specific demand for space to which each specific architectural proposal answers? And furthermore, who is going to own the space to be produced and thus have the right to shape the rules of the space’s use? Common space may indeed emerge against the directives of a certain authority that has planned it either as public space under certain conditions or even as private space (or public space to be offered to private profit making). Any kind of appropriation of public space that overspills the rules imposed by the authority responsible for its production will inevitably lead to contestation. And contest essentially transverses all three levels of the architectural generation of form. All three levels can and do [End Page 90] express differing forms of social antagonism and differing forms of polemic over the common. Urban issues at stake become arenas of urban conflicts. And urban conflicts result in different views and practices concerning urban form. The three levels of architectural form illustrate that architectural form is neither a definite solution to a problem posed by society nor efficient or successful regardless of the process through which it was articulated and the presuppositions on which it was based. For example, “form as organization” is clearly connected to presuppositions regarding forms of common life, forms of co-existence, forms of definition of a common world. “Form as expression” obviously touches upon issues of social values to be shared or to be denied. And “form as materialization” directly raises questions that compare means and ends: is the resulting common space the product of commoning practices?

In addition, if the production of common space is to be considered a process that overspills the existing definitions of public space and confronts the authorities that tend to limit the dynamism of such space, then this process has to be evaluated according to the historically specific conditions of its emergence. Were those conditions favorable for practices that could possibly bypass state control or state paternalism? Could architectural form and commoning acts challenge existing embedded authorities? Could the production of common space avoid the suffocating embrace of market mechanisms?

There are in fact many cases of architectural experimentation in the shaping of common space that accept the economic or institutional support of state mechanisms. For example, the project of the Academy for a New Gropiustadt works to convert mass housing settlements to “a model for a resilient urban environment.”22 Explicitly targeted to contribute to the “debate on commons and public welfare,”23 this project encourages collaboration with residents as well as efforts to influence the decisions of institutional actors. One cannot simply dismiss such efforts as acts aimed at restoring trust in the state and to the welfare imaginary in periods of harsh neoliberalism. Struggles for and through common space are always historically specific. But if we want to try to imagine and support attempts at commoning that go beyond existing capitalism and domination, we will need to explore practices of common space production that directly oppose state and market interventions.24 USINA’s work—based on a strong homeless movement—managed to shape the [End Page 91] movement’s demands of the local state of São Paulo and thus ensure that the final result was to be connected with collectively self-managed practices of space-commoning.

In a different way but with a similar spirit, Occupied squares directly defied the market and the state in constructing their ephemeral common spaces inside emblematic public spaces of capitalist metropolises. These collective experiences of place-making were thus added to differing attempts to shape the polemic over the common by supporting popular participation in the definition of more inclusive and more just common urban worlds. In, against, and beyond capitalist enclosures, common space can trigger practices that gesture towards an emancipated society.

Architecture, as an intellectual practice that chooses to take sides in this process, may indeed contribute today to social experiments that will create glimpses of a liberating future. Equally distanced from both the fantasies of the avant-garde architect as the chosen creator of the future and the cynicism of the star architect in service of the state and the capital, today’s engaged architects may modestly participate in collective efforts to imagine, visualize, produce, and use emerging common spaces. In those spaces, the seeds of tomorrow’s emancipation are being carefully planted.

STAVROS STAVRIDESis Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens, Greece. He has published seven books (as well as numerous articles) on spatial theory: The Symbolic Relation to Space (1990), Advertising and the Meaning of Space (1996), The Texture of Things (1996), the award-winning From the City-as-Screen to the City-as-Stage (2002), Suspended Spaces of Alterity (2010), Towards the City of Thresholds (2010), and Common Space: The City as Commons (2016). His research is currently focused on forms of emancipating spatial practices and urban commoning.

13. The Homeless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem-Teto, or MTST) is a social movement operating in São Paulo, Brazil that condemned skyrocketing rents in the face of bloated government spending on the 2014 World Cup.

14. For discussion of this example, see Stavros Stavrides, “Squares in Movement,” South Atlantic Quarterly 111.3 (Summer 2012): 585-96.

15. For discussion of this example, see An Architektur, “On the Commons,” An Architektur 23 (2010), 3-27 and 3 inserts.

18. On “Red Vienna,” see Walter Zednicek, Architektur des Roten Wien (Wien: Verlag Walter Zednicek, 2009) and Eve Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); on the Weimar Republic’s Grossiedlungen, see Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) and Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth. Avant-gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); and on Soviet Russia’s early urban experiments in the collectivization of city life, see Selim O. Khan-Magowedov, Pioneers of Soviet Architecture. The Search of New Solutions in the 1920s and 1930s (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987).

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